I installed Mint 13 a few months ago. The performance is truly appalling - does it really gobble up so much more resources than my previous Mint 9? It is really bad when there are two sessions open, but even normal operations in single user can be very slow.
My config is as screenshot below. I accept it is rather an old laptop, but Linux has always been sold as the o/s which gets the best out of older systems.

Can anyone give me some hints as to how I can tweak the set up to speed things up?

Your "desktop" (as in KDE, MATE, etc) makes a big difference; my Mint16 w/fluxbox uses about 100 MB at boot (time=17sec); a fairly fresh install of LMDE/MATE used over 500MB (time=~50sec). My Arch install w/fluxbox used about 110MB. If you go over your 1GB memory (your pic), it'll start using swap and then things get pretty slow. Fluxbox is a bit weird for most people, and Xfce is probably the "lightest" regular Mint install.

Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] if/when it is solved!Your data and OS are backed up....right?Mint 19.1 Xfce/fluxboxManjaro openbox/fluxbox

I don't know if some Cinnamon stuff has to be uninstalled, but if so it might make your system less stable, I'm not sure.

Not that new an install, unfortunately - a couple of months into it, with all associated baggage. Anyway, by mentioning even the possibility of things becoming 'unstable' if I get under the bonnet I shall probably have to live with the poor performance.

Kalyk wrote:Only adding Mate doesn't make it unstable, so you might just do that.

But your earlier post adds (after the terminal instruction to install Mate) "I don't know if some Cinnamon stuff has to be uninstalled, but if so it might make your system less stable, I'm not sure."This sentence is what made me nervous!

I did the install of Mate on my fathers laptop and it worked ok.
Then using Mate might solve the problems.
But if it doesn't solve the problem then something from Cinnamon might cause the problem.
And I'm not sure about the uninstalling of parts or all of Cinnamon.

Add (Solved) to the topic-title of the first post when appropriate so others know they might find a solution here.

Install MATE (or XFCE, if you'd rather). It does not conflict with Cinnamon, and it will not make your system unstable.

In regards to a new install and your current data, you should look into moving your data to a separate /home partition.
It's much easier to do during install, but there are plenty of tutorials out there for moving it post-install.
With a separate /home partition, you can upgrade from version to version without losing your config files, documents, etc. (though you would need to reinstall whatever programs you've added)